


The melody haunts my reverie

by Deepdarkwaters



Category: Ballet Shoes - Noel Streatfeild
Genre: F/F, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-02
Updated: 2014-09-02
Packaged: 2018-02-15 19:46:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2241192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deepdarkwaters/pseuds/Deepdarkwaters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The year after the war ends, Petrova Fossil visits her sisters in Hollywood for the first time and has to make a decision about her future while still coming to terms with the events of the past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The melody haunts my reverie

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Makioka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Makioka/gifts).



And now the purple dusk of twilight time  
Steals across the meadows of my heart  
High up in the sky the little stars climb  
Always reminding me that we're apart

[Stardust - Hoagy Carmichael](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2fbOAyNOpM)

 

 

Los Angeles was about as different to London as a place could possibly be. Petrova supposed that would be true at any time, but the effect was even plainer after six years of war and almost one of cleaning up after, or at least starting to clean up after. It wasn't the type of job one could breeze through in an afternoon, of course, like a child tidying away its toys, and sitting by a swimming pool in the bright Californian sun wearing a borrowed bathing suit and drinking iced tea felt uncomfortably as though she had turned her back on all that she knew.

"You're very quiet, darling," Garnie said, bringing another glass of tea and then slipping off her shoes so she could sit beside Petrova on the edge of the pool and dip her toes in. Like Pauline, she wore red polish on her nails now. Petrova leaned against her very slightly – she had never been the sort of person to ask for a hug, even as a little girl – and watched the odd shimmering illusion of their feet changing shape beneath the surface of the water, wondering whether to say anything at all. Bringing up the war in a place so bright and carefree seemed awful, somehow; and yet the thought that everyone had changed so much between Cromwell Road and Hollywood that they wouldn't like her to speak her mind was a worse one, and suddenly she felt ashamed of her reticence.

"Where is the Muroc Airfield?"

Behind them she heard a shuffling noise, and looked over her shoulder to see Pauline turning upside-down on her lounger and moving onto her front to be closer to them, with her head where her feet had been before. "Gosh," she said, "I don't know, but I am impressed you've been here almost two hours and it's the first time you've mentioned anything to do with aeroplanes."

"I expect it's in a place called Muroc," Posy offered, wearing her best innocent face as she practised endless barefoot battements against the garden fence, and Petrova smiled; it felt like a terribly long time since she had received such a Posy-ish answer to a question.

"It's near Lancaster, wherever that is," she said.

Pauline reached out to steal her glass and drink half its contents before she answered, "Lancaster's about sixty or so miles. You know, there are airfields much closer if you want to go and gaze at engines and things."

"No, I need to go to Muroc specifically."

"She met a young soldier, I expect," Nana said, sounding as though she strongly disapproved – although that was simply her manner, Petrova thought, remembering suddenly the muffled late-night laughter of half a lifetime ago when Pauline said _Nana would sound disapproving even about a dear little kitten_ and Posy leapt out of bed to improvise an impersonation so wickedly funny that they'd had to stuff their pillows into their mouths to keep quiet for fear of Nana finding them in hysterics at midnight. "I thought you were the sensible one, Petrova, and here you are wanting to drive a hundred miles through the desert to—"

" _Sixty_ miles, Nana," Pauline said reprovingly, "and nobody said anything about a soldier."

"Besides, wouldn't it be a pilot?" Posy asked. "Or a mechanic or an engineer or something." There was a flash of blue and green as she dived into the pool, looking like a kingfisher in the bathing suit she had been wearing to practise, and emerged with her Shirley Temple curls stretched long against her cheeks and neck with the weight of the water. She swam over to where the others were and kept herself afloat with an elbow on the tiled side, seeming almost not to realise she was doing it when she took hold of Petrova's foot and began manipulating it into a point as though to test whether she could still make the shape. "Did you meet a pilot? Pauline met one. He was very handsome but rather rude, and kept making fun of our accents."

"John made fun of everything." The words spilled from her as suddenly and as unplanned as a sneeze, and even as she began to cry for the first time in years she found she was laughing too at the memories: his absurd jokes, the odd twisted faces he pulled when something displeased him, the delight spread wide across his mouth when she met his taunting comments with her own instead of folding up, the horrible way he danced like a dying crane fly. Even as Garnie took her hand and Pauline slipped off the lounger to wrap her arms around Petrova from behind, the pain of losing him – and so many of the others, but mostly him – welled up and up within her until she felt as though she might shatter like a dropped glass.

Nana settled then against Petrova's other side, and more gently she said, "Use my handkerchief, dear, and let's hear about this John."

 

* * *

  
 

When Petrova met John she was fixing a truck and he was rude to her in that peculiar way Americans have that still manages to be infuriatingly charming somehow. First he called her _buddy_ as he was coming through the gate, raising his voice to carry across the paved bit of the garden and into the open garage where she was working – _garage_ was a stretch, really; it wasn't much more than a canopy hung between the wall of Gum's cottage near RAF Saffron Walden and a couple of salvaged fence posts – and then when she turned to look at him, perturbed and vaguely irritated by the intrusion when she'd been rather enjoying herself in peace, he laughed like a film star, like somebody Pauline might know all the way over in Hollywood, and put his hand over his heart as though he were a bad actor about to pour too much emotion into a Shakespeare soliloquy.

"I sincerely beg your pardon, ma'am."

"Do you greet all strangers with _hey buddy_?" she enquired, searching for a rag to wipe her oily palms.

"I thought you were a – I guess I shouldn't finish that sentence."

Petrova's treacherous mouth formed a smile entirely against her will, and she scrubbed her hands down the front of her overalls instead and offered him her right one to shake. "Petrova Fossil."

"John Danvers. I need some parts for my useless old heap of junk – I mean, my car. The fellows told me to ask for Pete."

"The fellows can't quite manoeuvre their stubborn little minds around the idea of a woman mechanic, not even in wartime."

He looked suspicious. " _You're_ Pete?"

"Do feel free to call me that," she countered, "as long as you don't mind my calling you Jean in return."

She had been unsure whether or not she found him annoying, but when he laughed again – a nice sound, open and easy – and called it a deal, she decided the uncertainty was a waste of time because they already felt like friends.

 

*

  
 

There was a dance hall at the aerodrome, or at least they all tried to pretend it was a dance hall and not merely the common room with the tables shoved against the walls and someone's borrowed gramophone in the corner. After one too many close calls, stumbling toward the cellar stairs while the sirens sounded and the black painted windows rattled in their frames and the burst of gunfire and bombs sounded like hellish thunder outside, Eddie Applegate – who had been reassigned to working on the radios after losing half his foot when his plane was shot down, and now thought he and his gramophone were Essex's answer to Glenn Miller – moved all his records downstairs and they danced there instead, in staggered shifts: they slept to ease away the excitement of dancing, and they danced to ease away the tension of working, and they worked to keep busy in between because being idle was the same as being useless and that felt terrifying.

"It doesn't feel much safer down here," John called to Petrova, as he span Ruth Haverford around in giddy circles while she laughed and clung to him and shrieked about feeling sick.

"I daresay poor Ruth would rather be out there shining her torch at the Luftwaffe," she called back from her chair at the side of the room. Beside her, Bet Thurston and Mary Tamsett were sharing a cup of tea and trying to write letters by the dim light, until Mary threw her pencil down and said, "I can't concentrate with those saxophones!" She grabbed the hand of the next man walking by, swinging the surprised Frank Winslow into a dance almost as spirited as the one John was inflicting on Ruth, and Bet leaned back in her chair and laughed as though the war outside were happening somewhere else.

"Why is everybody in this place such a dreadful dancer? Is it too much to ask, really, for a man to have a right foot and a left foot rather than two lefts?"

Petrova looked at her friend the way she always looked at her: surreptitiously and sideways, a sneaking glance through her eyelashes that was ready to flicker away casually at the very moment she was noticed. Bet's hair, chocolate brown and prone to curl in ways that frustrated her, was mostly hidden beneath a navy silk scarf, and she was wearing wide trousers and a man's shirt beneath a jumper she had knitted for her brother and accidentally shrunk in the wash before she could give it to him; yet she seemed to glow, the way film actresses did when they had a very clever lighting man. Even smudged with grease, working on ambulance engines or the fuselage of a plane, she looked as though she belonged beside Pauline instead of Petrova.

Bursting with a sudden incredible courage that seemed to well up from nowhere, as though some part of her finally felt ready to beat Pauline in _something_ , Petrova said, "I have a right and a left. Dance with me."

When the others saw them, Ruth and John and Mary and Frank, they began to whoop and whistle like soldiers at a Windmill show. Petrova never usually danced, and she had let her friends think she was shy or embarrassed about her lack of skill when really it was because the Academy had left her with the sense that dancing was something one fretted about having to do when money was short at home; but that night in the makeshift dance hall she danced for the first time as though she meant it, as strong and graceful and mechanically precise as she had always been but _free_ and feeling something she had never been able to grasp before no matter how patient Theo was in her extra lessons at home. She laughed, feeling dizzy and drunk, whirling Bet around to the blare of trumpets and trombones and faraway bombs falling on Chelmsford; and later, in the little room they shared, Bet climbed down from her bunk and squeezed into Petrova's, singing _Moonlight Serenade_ as a string of quiet little "ba ba da ba" sounds that were barely louder than a whisper as she began to unbutton both of their pyjama shirts.

Something changed that night, something new began, and not only for them, as it turned out.

 

*

  
 

Whenever anybody died in battle or in a bomb drop the news seemed to spread through the air like a virus, as though it jumped from brain to brain without having to pass through the conduit of speech. It was dark when the news of Frank Winslow's death seeped into her consciousness, almost time for bed, but the realisation of his loss settled low in her stomach like an ache, one that burned deeper and fiercer the more she let it lie until she threw down her book and her half-eaten sandwich and let herself out into the night so the cool air she dragged into her lungs with every heaving, ragged breath could begin to settle it.

"You'll black out if you breathe like that."

John was behind her when she turned, chasing the tip of his cigarette with a lit match and shaking too much to make them meet until at last the match burned his fingers; he dropped it and the cigarette to the ground then, and stood motionless in the doorway as though he'd forgotten how to move.

"Did you hear?" Petrova asked. Her lips felt numb; the words sounded strange, as though they belonged to someone else. "Frank and I learned to fly at the same aerodrome outside of London, he congratulated me after my first solo flight even before my instructor did."

John said, "I heard," and quite suddenly he was crying in a way Petrova had never known anybody could cry before; except herself, she realised, on the dreadful day almost a year after the dance when Bet's mother had died of a heart attack as she drove her ambulance through the East End - the unfairness of a heart attack taking someone who had fearlessly driven an ambulance through the falling bombs and rubble of the Blitz was hideous - and Bet had gone home to take care of her orphaned brothers and sister. She felt worse, then, comparing the two events: Bet was alive, after all. Whatever magic the dance had conjured between them was over by necessity, but she was alive.

She took his arm and led him away, fearful that somebody else might hear and draw the same conclusions somehow. The only place she could think of to be safely alone was a shed behind the sleeping quarters, a rotting old wooden thing barely even fit to store the remnants of scrapped cars and planes that couldn't be used elsewhere, and once they were around the corner and out of sight she took her hand from his elbow and he seemed to crumple, stumbling to one knee and fitting the crook of his elbow tightly across his face to muffle the sounds of his wretched heaving breaths.

"John," she started desperately, but there seemed to be nothing suitable to follow that and so she knelt beside him and put her hand on his shoulder, holding it there in silence for what felt like half the night until finally he stopped shuddering and fell awkwardly onto his back on the scrubby grass.

The ground was damp beneath them, as though the shadows cast throughout the day by the bulk of the shed kept the earth from ever drying out properly; Petrova's elbow sank into it when she raised herself up, leaned over John, and placed a lit cigarette in his mouth.

"I won't ask you to talk to me. I know there are some things one doesn't like to say to anybody."

"Pete—"

" _Jean_ ," she interrupted, mock-reproving, and then they both fell silent again, she still leaning above him and searching his eyes in the dim orange glow that flared a touch brighter every time he drew on his cigarette, cupped in his hand out of habit.

She thought about Bet Thurston then, her throaty smoker's laugh and her habit of raking her fingers through Petrova's cropped hair when they kissed, and wondered exactly what John was remembering about Frank.

"I'm sorry," he said, after he stubbed out his cigarette in the mud beside his hip. "How absurd of me to go on like that as though nobody else ever lost a friend."

"A friend," Petrova repeated lightly. "A friend the way Bet was mine?" – and John breathed out a shaking sigh, searching for her hand in the darkness and holding it as tightly as though one of them were falling.

 

*

  
 

One by one the men fell – not all of the ones she knew, not even most of them, but it often felt like it. She learned the trick of folding the hurt up tight and tucking it away; everybody did. She didn't cry when John died. She simply made a cup of tea, and allowed herself an extra half a teaspoon of sugar in it. The planes wouldn't fly themselves to where they were needed, after all, and it wasn't as though she had lost both brothers and her father within six months of one another like Mary.

"We've won," Gum said, when it was all over, and Petrova stared blankly at the fossils set on the living room shelves instead of books and said, "There's no winner in any of this."

 

* * *

  
 

Petrova opened her eyes, scrubbed them hard with Nana's sodden handkerchief, and felt like some sort of outrageous traitor having to condense a whole world of fear and love and friendship into words that could never be big enough.

"He drowned on a rescue mission," she said, in place of everything she wished that she could tell them. "They made them fly those dreadful Walruses, horrible cold rickety noisy old dinosaurs – they're as strong as anything and loop like a dream, but so awfully uncomfortable to fly, and the weather was appalling, and I don't know what happened but they say even the best pilots can't take on the British weather when it's feeling disagreeable. I've just been to see his mother in San Bernadino, to take her some photographs and things. It's easy to feel as though you've come to terms with somebody's death when you're not watching his mother cry. She's English, and – oh, Garnie, she reminded me so much of you."

Garnie's grip on her hand tightened, and Petrova held on gratefully, swallowing hard to settle the bittersweet memory of clasped hands as an anchor on the day that Frank was killed.

"I don't know how a mother can bear it," Garnie said in a low voice, as though speaking quietly might hide the tremble in the sound. "I expect it's a cowardly thing to say, but I gave thanks every day for six years that the three of you are girls and didn't have to fight."

"Probably best not to tell you about all those times I ferried planes through barrage balloons and lightning in the dark without a map, then," Petrova muttered, falling without meaning to back into the gallows humour habit of the war, and beside her Nana made a tutting noise and said, " _Really_ , Petrova," in such an exasperated tone that Posy had to disappear back beneath the water in the pool to hide her amusement.

It seemed wrong to speak any more of the war then, as though the moment had passed; but speaking of frivolous things seemed inappropriate as well, so everybody fell into a thoughtful silence – Petrova almost dozing at the side of the pool, with Garnie stroking her fingers through her hair as though she were still a child – until somebody's stomach gave a great rumble and Nana went inside to make some sandwiches while the others stifled their laughter.

 

* * *

  
 

Pauline's house had enough guestrooms for everybody with several to spare, and yet the three of them still ended up crowded together in her bed that night as though the years spent separated meant that while they were all together they needed to be within arm's reach.

"Why do you need to go to that airfield?" Pauline asked suddenly. "I forgot you'd even mentioned it, after everything."

"That's where John's father is. He designs new aircrafts, all these strange experimental things I could bore you to death with. Mrs Danvers wants me to take John's photographs and letters to him."

"And?" Pauline prompted, as though she knew there was more unsaid, and Petrova felt her mouth twisting into an awkward grimace.

"And she said he's looking for an assistant. More of an apprentice, really. He hoped John would be able to do it, but Mrs Danvers seemed rather insistent that I should take his place after she found out I don't like anything in the world except flying and mending things. And, you know, I don't know whether I'd even be allowed to, being a woman, being non-military, English, Russian, everything, or whether I'd be allowed but he'd look at me as though I'm a lunatic for daring to enquire. 'Here are your dead son's things, please may I have a job?' I really don't know what I ought to do."

To her left Posy wriggled in place trying to get comfortable and ended up with her curly head pressed to Petrova's shoulder. "What on earth is there to stop you? You've been offered a chance. Take it."

She had always seen things in such a determined, black-and-white, almost callous way, and Petrova struggled for a moment to find the right words to explain how grey it really was until Pauline interrupted.

"Look how much the world has changed since we began to make those vows. Experimental aeronautics really could get you in the history books, you know."

"Yes, but what's the point of making a vow to get into the history books without the benefit of nepotism if I simply ask someone else's father for help instead? Besides, I'm sort of already in them," Petrova added, unsure why it felt faintly embarrassing now it had actually happened. "There are people writing books about the ATA now, you know. I doubt there'll be children learning about us in their classrooms in fifty years, not with everything else that's happened, and it might only be a mention of my name beneath a huge group photograph, but even so. Fossil in print and bound on a bookcase."

Nobody spoke for a few moments, then Posy said severely, "For goodness' sake, Petrova, that's not what any of us meant. Just go and meet John's father, make him hire you, invent something that _will_ get you taught in classrooms. It's no different to Manoff helping me, or Mr Reubens helping Pauline. They would never have offered in the first place if we didn't have talent of our own."

"Send yourself to the moon like Bedford and Cavor," Pauline suggested, sounding as though she were only half-joking. "You can do anything you put your mind to. Look at Posy and me. I don't mean to say it'll be easy, I expect you'll run into brick walls everywhere you go, but that's never stopped you before. Why now?"

"It feels fraudulent."

There, she thought, the words are out.

"Fraudulent how?" Pauline asked, nudging her gently with an elbow after a moment as though concerned Petrova might fall asleep before forming an answer.

"Mrs Danvers assumed we were sweethearts. She was so upset, but so happy at the thought that he'd been happy, and I tried to explain but she was fixated on her own imagined truth and – _why_ is everything so complicated?" she asked bitterly, knowing there was no answer, wishing there were. In her temper she started to say, "I don't even like—" and then froze, feeling a nauseating fear creep through her stomach, closing her lips tightly against the wild confession that felt as though it were clinging to the very tip of her tongue, ready and desperate to be spoken.

"I don't suppose anybody who grew up around Doctor Smith and Doctor Jakes would mind something like that," Posy said sleepily, taking half of the sheets with her when she turned onto her side.

It took a moment for the words to settle, then Petrova spluttered, "Posy, what in the world are you talking about?"

"Didn't you know?" She yawned pointedly. "Do be quiet, I'm going to sleep."

Petrova could feel Pauline trembling with silent laughter beside her. "I didn't know either," she said, "not until we came here. I had no idea that was even a possibility for people, but this town seems peculiarly less concerned than most others about what people do behind their closed front doors. My eyes have been opened so wide it's a miracle I can close them to sleep at night."

Petrova lay awake between her sisters for a long time after that, warm and content and feeling curiously safe for the first time in years, even though the war had been over for months. She could smell the lingering notes of Pauline's perfume, and hear the little kittenish sounds of Posy's gentle snores, and she closed her eyes to the unfamiliar bedroom, remembering instead the crowded little room they had shared for so long in the house on Cromwell Road, which had cracks in the ceiling that looked like contour lines on a map, and green curtains about as old as Nana.

"Her name was Bet," she whispered into the darkness, and Pauline beside her mumbled something vague and sleepy that made Petrova smile.


End file.
